Wednesday the board will hear a report about the district's ACT scores. As you may be aware our district now requires all juniors to take the ACT as we believe that the ACT is a more useful measure of academic progress than the state mandated WKCE. In the past the MG district has had ACT voluntary participation rates of about 60-70%, this compares to results for 92% of students reported for 2008-9 under the new policy. No other district in Dane county or CESA 2 reports participation rates higher than 75%. Without mandatory participation there is a significant selection bias in the reported results.
With the higher participation rate last year's data shows a drop in our average scores (Composite is 21.7 v. 22.5 in 2007-8), but we don't have a good basis for comparison with other district that use mandatory ACT testing.
Personally I think comparison with other districts is not important. What is important is how well prepared our students are for life, and how well we are improving on that mission. Toward those ends the ACT rates students to a "college readiness benchmark" in 4 content areas: English, Algebra, Social Science, and Biology. Students meeting the benchmark have a 50% chance of obtaining a B or higher in corresponding college course work. How do we stack up? The results, which I find disturbing are:
% of MG students meeting benchmark:
English Composition 68%
Algebra 49%
Social Science 52%
Biology 35%
All 4 28%
When only 30% of our students are prepared for college in all area it is clear we have significant work to do, but with the EPAS testing program in place we now have a better framework to understand our strengths and weaknesses and on which to build improvements.
A history of MG students post graduate plans can be found by clicking here.
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(photo ©2008 Bruce Fritz)
About Me
- Peter Sobol
- My family moved to Monona in 2003 and have been happily ensconsed in the Frost Woods Neighborhood ever since. I have 2 kids who graduated from Mg. I have been serving on the school board since April of 2007. We moved back to the Midwest in 2002 after spending 10 years in California, where I was a Department Director for Maxtor, a Fortune 500 company. In truth we left California largely because of the school situation - chronically underfunded schools did not offer the kind of programs or opportunities we wanted for our children. We picked Monona because our thorough research showed that this was a place we would really like to educate our kids. Our experience has taught us to value the quality schools we have here in Monona, and the importance of careful stewardship to maintain community support for those schools.
9 comments:
Those are some low numbers. Typically, what percentage of students go on to college in our district vs statewide? What do they define as college (ie UW system, technical college, Harvard...)?
Can you say what are some ways to remedy this situation? Is there a way to bring in new curriculum? Revamp each grade level to make it more academically challenging? Utilize a more structured curriculum (for instance IB jumps in my head)to ready our students?
Also, I was a former High School Teacher. When I would proctor exams, I found there were "x" percentage that really didn't see "what was in it for them" when taking standardized tests. They finished quickly. They made patterns on their sheet instead of reading the questions. It was very frustrating as a teacher because the administrators and school board put so much stake into these exams (ie the meetings and analysis of these numbers were so "crucial" for the district) but in reality...there were kids throwing the test and bringing down the numbers. Any comments on this to make it more "real" to the students? (ie score a certain score or you will not graduate kind of thing...which would be harsh but it was the only example I can think of)
If you analyzed college attendance amongst our grads, I'd be amazed if it didn't follow socio-economic lines. What this district has never looked at is the factors that point to whether or not a child will attend college. You can predict this by about the sixth grade. If a kid is White, from an upper middle class background, and has a parent who attended college - particularly the Mom, he or she is far more likely to attend 4-year college than a kid who has fewer of thse factors- regardless of academic ability or achievement. And that's a bad thing, I think. Worse, our guidance department has no formal way of reaching out to students who have ability, but fall into the deomographic that is less likely to attend 4 year. The parents who bitch about our guidance department are, for the most part, quite capable of negotiating the college admission minefield without a lot of help. They have the social network that allows them to do so. In my opinion, our HS should concentrate on the kids who should go to college, but are at risk for not doing so.
As for ACT, it matters. A lot. Why? Because many private schools dole out money based on ACT and GPA. They have a formula and base aid is given on thse factors. Other merit aid is given on other factors, too, but the base amount is often a direct result of ACT. ACT = $$$ for school. It's not the only thing we need to worry about, but we need to get those scores up so kids can get scholarships. It may be an ufortunate game, but a game it is, nonetheless.
Also, do you have a handle on the number of MG kids who must take remedial Math and English courses at college? This is the perfect time of year to get those data because it's in the face of every kid going off to school during these weeks. A simple return post card asking parents/students to report their math placement would get some information I suspect we wouldn't be thrilled about. Easy as pie. Just ask them for the name of the college and the math course number. Trust me, you'll get a good response rate from the group who was placed in remedial math because this cost's $$$ to families who have to pay for classes that don't count for college credit!!!
The College Board tries to define the benchmarks in terms of what they consider a "typical" college, based on a weighted average from 98 participating institutions.
You can read more about it here:
http://www.act.org/research/policymakers/pdf/benchmarks.pdf
Typically we see 50-70% of students going on to 4 year colleges and another 20-30 going to vocational programs. The numbers vary from year to year - I've added a link in the main post.
How do we make it more real for students? Good question. I know this is a problem, its something that shows up in statistical analysis of the results of some of our other standardized tests. I'll raise the issue the next chance I get.
What do we do to improve? The results show we have a long way to go, but we also have a lot of company. Schools in this country as a whole are going to have to find means to vastly improved educational effectiveness. The large gap between were we are an were we need to be demands significant change. To me this means full implementation of an outcome driven model of operation. Adopting and using significant metrics (as MG has done) is just the first step.
A brief read of this, and the thing that jumps out at me is the science score. There has been concern about the lack of a rigorous science track at MG- this seems to back that up.
A rigorous science track would serve those students who are already doing fine on the ACT. What we need is not a track, but a rigorous science curriculum for every student.
So much of this conversation about rigor, how our kids do in college, etc. is based on assumptions and personal anecdotes because we don't collect hard data on grads. If we want to open some eyes, we really do need to know the remedial math/english placement rates of our grads. And I don't believe we know that for, say, the top five campuses that MG kids attend. Or do we? Peter?
I don't see a benchmark for music. We pull kids out of science class for small group music lessons, why don't we pull them out of music for small group science lessons?
Ooooohhh... I love that idea. Let's pull them out of music for all kinds of scientific, mathematical and english "gigs".
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